Polymer Vision Produces 5" Rollable Displays

drquizas writes "Polymer Vision (associated with Philips) has produced a rollable display using organic electronic techniques. The display, currently measuring 5" diagonal and capable of displaying QVGA at 320x240, will eventually be targeted towards applications such as military uses (maps anyone?), newspapers and e-books."

Comments

Wallpaper

[ArmenTanzarian]

With this on my walls and those window LCD's I can finally live my dream of never leaving my parents' basement!

Military maps? Why?

[WIAKywbfatw]

At least if you've got the paper kind you don't have to worry about it crashing, breaking, running out of power, etc. And with the paper kind, you can easily mark way points, targets, etc in seconds - doing that with a software-based system won't be half as fast.

I can't imagine a field commander taking along one of these without wanting a paper map as a backup. The last thing you want to do in a combat zone is be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Re:Military maps? Why?

[fish_in_the_c]

I actually at the moment work for the military in the mission planning field. Much of the mission planning that is already done is done on computers. Some plains ( bigger ones) carry laptops to be able to replay their mission in flight if needed. I'd think the advantage in something like this is as much in the fact that it will not shatter or crack when dropped/ stepped on ect. Not to mention it is lightweight.

Re:Military maps? Why?

[FrostedWheat]

"A computer with a bullet hole is a paper weight, but a map with a bullet hole is still a map."

I read that on Slashdot ages ago, sorry don't remember who said it!

Re:Military maps? Why?

[kfg]

One of the major complaints of the troops in Iraq is battery life. Everything has batteries in it. Even the helmets have battery packs.

GPS was a necessary tool in the dessert. The land is kinda flat and sand colored. All of it. There are no reference points and navigating on land becomes equivilent to navigating at sea. The "map" is a sand colored chart you can plot your points on, not so much a reference you can use to get from one place to another.

They loved laptops, but only because they could power them from a vehicle. They were issued PDAs but found them fairly useless because the battery life was too short in the field.

It's the new, high tech army, sponsored by Duracell and the Energizer Bunny.

There are some obvious advantages to this display. Of course it's light, it uses little power, in some respects it can be used as a chart. You can mark it. It doesn't physically break anymore than a plastic placemat breaks. It's water proof. So long as it get data the single display can be any map the data source has access to so you don't need to be lugging around huge stacks of charts.

But the biggest thing that negates some of the advantages this display has is that it is inherently static state. That is to say it only needs to be powered to change the display. Not only does that mean very little power drain in use, it means once an image is displayed it can be completely disconected from the power and any other device and the image remains.

That's pretty frickin' cool.

I'm already planning (I've already read about this thing) to use a screen like this for the electronic navigation system of a new boat. Take a GPS reading, or display a bit of chart, turn it off and the reading/chart remains. One brief flash of power than off again.

On the other hand if you think I'm going bluewater without a chronometer and sextant you're nuts. I always expect electronic gear to fail about the second day out. I'm often right.

KFG

Re:important factoid,

[kinnell]

for the momment, it's monochrome

Much like many newspapers. And we know how poor they are at displaying information.

Lifetime: months?

[RobertB-DC]

From the article:
Further, "the life of our organic electronics displays has been already prolonged from ?hours to months," [Bas van Rens, general manager at Polymer Vision] added.

I'm trying to figure this one out... is he saying that this cool roll-up display, with four shades of grey and readable as paper, will self destruct after a few months?

And they're so hard to produce, that he can only make 5000 a year? Just to have ten engineers running the line at $100k/yr (or one executive at $1m/yr) would make each one cost $500 bucks.

No wonder he's targeting the military. Nobody else can afford to spend $500-$1000 on displays that don't last much longer than a gallon of milk in a wet paper sack. But I can envision plenty of 100% valid military applications -- after all, if you're going to blow up a million-dollar cruise missile, why not give it a thousand-dollar configuration panel?

Ideally, of course, the military money helps get the screen into the production levels required for the consumer market. Extend the lifespan to six months and drop the cost to under $60 bucks, and people will pay $10/month for disposable e-books.

This could end up being a MAJOR problem...

[10101001011]

I was just thinking of something (I know, scary isn't it). These things will probably be priced reasonably in a short period of time and as Phillips likely hopes will one day replace a good chunck of print media.

What about disposal? It is likely that if they are priced reasonably enough they may become just as disposable as newspaper (all right, not quite so bad) but even if only one in ten people disposed of these things after they became damaged (look how we treat our newspapers and tell me these things won't be piling up in the dump) how are we supposed to get rid of them? They likely contain a fair amount of material that is not decomposable within a reasonable amount of time. We already know that computers are adding quite a bulge to the normal waste, how would seveal million sheets of this stuff hold up (quite well I'm guessing, probably 100,000 - 500,000 years!)

This is of course only my perspective but it does give reason to pause.